Commit 63209a71 authored by Mark Brown's avatar Mark Brown Committed by Liam Girdwood
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regulator: Add some brief design documentation 



Provide some brief documentation of some of the design decisions that
are made by the regulator API.

Signed-off-by: default avatarMark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLiam Girdwood <lrg@slimlogic.co.uk>
parent 55c1d7c6

Documentation/power/regulator/design.txt

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Regulator API design notes

==========================



This document provides a brief, partially structured, overview of some

of the design considerations which impact the regulator API design.



Safety

------



 - Errors in regulator configuration can have very serious consequences

   for the system, potentially including lasting hardware damage.

 - It is not possible to automatically determine the power confugration

   of the system - software-equivalent variants of the same chip may

   have different power requirments, and not all components with power

   requirements are visible to software.



  => The API should make no changes to the hardware state unless it has

     specific knowledge that these changes are safe to do perform on

     this particular system.



Consumer use cases

------------------



 - The overwhelming majority of devices in a system will have no

   requirement to do any runtime configuration of their power beyond

   being able to turn it on or off.



 - Many of the power supplies in the system will be shared between many

   different consumers.



  => The consumer API should be structured so that these use cases are

     very easy to handle and so that consumers will work with shared

     supplies without any additional effort.